Abstract

Synthetic, fluorinated lipids incorporated into phospholipid membranes form highly uniform self-assembledlipid nanodomains. The size of nanodomains beyond optical resolution can quantitatively be determined using grazing-incidence x-ray diffraction. The long-range interaction can reach up to the distance that is eight times larger than the domain size, which can be interpreted within the theoretical framework of two-dimensional colloidalcrystallization. Coupling of bioactive molecules to lipid head groups would allow for the creation of highly uniform and strongly correlated functional nanodomains, which can be used to study the influence of molecular confinement on the cooperative interactions in biology.

Received 12 September 2008Accepted 25 October 2008Published online 25 November 2008

Acknowledgments:

We thank ESRF for the beamtime, R.R. Schmidt for the insightful comments on lipid synthesis, and E. Schneck for supporting the GID data analysis. This work was financially supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) Contract No. Ta253/6 and the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie. J.O. and A.W. gratefully acknowledge generous financial support of the German Excellence Initiative via the “Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM).”